After Paul Fraser's stroke in 2021 he struggled so badly to communicate that speech was nearly impossible and reading was out of the question.
His diagnosis with aphasia — a brain disorder that affects one in three stroke victims — shocked him and his family.
"I didn't know anything, even what it was called or what it was about," Mr Fraser said.
His wife, Julie Brown, couldn't travel from the couple's Byron Bay home to see Mr Fraser in his Brisbane hospital bed due to COVID restrictions at the time.
She had never heard of the condition either.
"I was at home by myself, googling aphasia, and not really knowing how bad he was or what the prognosis for improvement could be," Ms Brown said.
A debilitating illness
Aphasia, which stalled Bruce Willis's acting career in 2022, is often linked to stroke or head trauma and can affect speech, a person's understanding of other people, and the ability to read and write.
Professor David Copland, the director of the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre (QARC) at the University of Queensland, said it was debilitating.
"When someone loses their communication ability it can lead to [a] significant risk of depression and social isolation," Professor Copland said.
"How we communicate either restricts or enables a lot of activities in our everyday life, so we take it for granted."
Finding the words
Eighteen months on from his stroke, Mr Fraser has relearned how to speak with help from the QARC-developed Comprehensive High-dose Aphasia Treatment (CHAT) program.
"When we first started, it might take me 15 or 20 minutes trying to get the right word," Mr Fraser said.
"My son's into photography. I could see the picture of photography and I know it's photography but I couldn't say the word."
Mr Fraser said his confidence had increased so much through the program that he was now able to strike up conversations with people in public.
"I'll do that now whereas I wouldn't and didn't — I just didn't go out," he said.
"I wasn't getting the right words and it wasn't making sense, but now I get out and I have a go."
The CHAT program, which can be delivered in physical or telehealth sessions, gives people diagnosed with aphasia 50 hours of therapy in eight weeks.
Ms Brown said the change she noticed in her husband during the therapy period was remarkable.
"We've gone from not being able to understand anything he said, to the present where we can 95 per cent carry on as normal in terms of our communication," she said.
"I'm not exactly sure where we would be if we were left to our own devices."
Program expansion
Professor Copland said research showed other aphasia rehabilitation programs offering one or two hours per week for a limited period had little impact on recovery.
"If you think of what's happening with the recovery of the brain in aphasia, we're really expecting someone to re-learn their language with maybe 10 or 20 hours," he said.
"You wouldn't expect someone to learn a language in that amount of time, but this is someone who's had a stroke and we're expecting them to make those gains."
Funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council will now see the CHAT program expand from its only location within Brisbane's Metro North Hospital and Health Service to seven other hospital and health services in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia.
Professor Copland said the program's expansion would be increasingly important in the coming decades, when the number of Australians living with aphasia is expected to more than double.
"There's over 140,000 people living with aphasia in Australia alone," he said.
"By the year 2050 there'll be one million people living with stroke and of those around 300,000 will be living with aphasia.
"From what we've seen, it [the CHAT program] can really transform people's lives."
Ms Brown said expanding the program that helped rebuild her and her husband's ability to communicate made perfect sense, particularly when it was using telehealth to connect people.
"It just sped things up; it meant that you saved time on travel and transport," she said.
"And it means you can reach out to people in rural and regional areas who would otherwise have difficulty obtaining a face-to-face speech therapy experience.
"It's not practical for people in those areas to access those sorts of services and this program cuts through all that."
